


So the Sun Rises Over Seleya

by epicionly



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, In Memory of Leonard Nimoy, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-15 21:33:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3462812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epicionly/pseuds/epicionly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“T’Cyph. Listen.” The Captain shifts in his seat so that he is facing all of her now, and his eyes are blue. They are too blue, like space when T’Cyph had seen through the portholes of Enterprise, before it had been covered by the black. “Humans have their way of mourning. Your people have their own. Neither is wrong.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	So the Sun Rises Over Seleya

When the Captain enters the room, he seems more infallible than she remembers. The circles under his eyes are darker and heavier, weights he also carries on his shoulders.

Sakkath is already dismissing her from her duties, and the Ambassador is at his desk, so she departs immediately.

“I’m sorry,” she hears from the Captain, as she rounds the corner. His voice does not shake, but it falls flat. “My grief might not be appropriate considering the circumstances, but I’d like your help, if possible.”

If the Ambassador responds verbally, T’Cyph has no way of knowing.

\--

“Has the crew of the Enterprise docked?” her mother asks her, when she returns to their home. The room smells of unfamiliar herbal tea, of sand that T’Cyph still has yet to grown accustomed to approximately a year after their settlement.

T’Cyph inclines her head in acknowledgment. “The Captain was the first one beamed down.” She remembers his uniform, gold against the red and blue of his officers. She remembers the lines of his shoulders, the thread of sorrow that accompanied them, the despair that hummed from him in the knowledge of the last hour. The difference between that and the man standing in the Ambassador’s lodgings. “There will be a funeral?” she asks, drawing out the word.

“You have never been present at a shiva,” her mother remarks, and though it is no accusation, T’Cyph feels it like a brand to her katra.

“I have not,” T’Cyph acknowledges stiffly, busying herself with removing the strap of her bag over her shoulders. “I will go.”

“It will be beneficial to you,” her mother replies.

“The Enterprise crew grieved for us when we lost,” T’Cyph says suddenly, and hesitates at the doorway, when her mother looks on her. Will—“Should we not do the same in respect?” Could we, T’Cyph does not ask. Are we allowed.

“He was one of us,” her mother replies as though that is an answer, and T’Cyph does not miss the tense: Was.

“He is—was half-human as well,” she replies. She attempts his name, still new on her tongue, a stranger’s name that is not Selek. “Spock.” She observes the furrow settling in between her mother’s eyebrows, and elaborates. “I am...” She inclines her head, trying to think. “Conflicted,” she decides. “It is appropriate to grieve for a lost one. To mourn them when they are no longer.”

“Do you grieve?” T’Sanvi asks and draws closer. She smells of sand and incense; T’Cyph breathes in the scent quietly, even as her mother’s gentle fingers press reassuringly along her psi-points, as much as her tone is neutral from disapproval. “My daughter?”

“I—” T’Cyph lowers her eyes. Her stomach clenches. Young she is, and her control fluctuates at times. It would be presumptuous to say that she grieves when she has only heard of him, seen him in passing, never truly spoken to him. One, two words. Told that she is not alone in grieving for the dead. Therein is a larger complication. She swallows, surprised at how difficult this motion is. “His passing was abrupt.”

“The lives of the learned often are.” Softer now, fingers trailing down her face before they slide off her cheek with a feather-touch. T’Cyph feels the hum of their familial bond before it slides to silence. “His was a good life.”

“He spent less than a year among us,” T’Cyph protests. She looks down, ashamed at this brash display.

“A good life,” her mother repeats, and then, “In both this universe, and in another time and place. Do not grieve, child. He would not wish it.”

“The Captain’s crew grieves.” She hesitates. “The Captain grieves.”

Her mother inclines her head and says nothing.

T’Cyph feels ill. “May I be permitted to depart, mother?”

“T’Cyph,” her mother says, and T’Cyph waits obediently. She places a hand on T’Cyph’s shoulder, an emotional gesture with a significance that does not escape her. “He has led a fulfilling life.”

“Do you refer to Elder Spock?” T’Cyph asks, tone almost accusative, the name still new on her tongue. “Or do you refer to the Captain?”

Her mother raises an eyebrow at T’Cyph’s aggression. “I refer to you, child. We mourn only when a life has been wasted. Do you understand this?”

T’Cyph nods once, jerkily, remembering the flurry of whispers among the younger Vulcans. Remembers T’Lana’s blank face as she shared this news, remembers being forbidden from entering his chambers to ask. Remembers.

“I understand,” she says, though she does not.

For a moment, her mother does not answer.

“I shall endeavour to understand,” T’Cyph corrects, looking up, and that is only when her mother’s dark eyes lose their tension. “May I be permitted to depart?”

Her mother barely acquiesces before T’Cyph does.

\--

T’Cyph makes a stop at the clinic in town. Vulcans have evolved for a desert planet, and while the ghost planet Amniiba is not too different, there is a question of taking some vaccines and other more consistent injections to stem off any potential harm of their new environment until their bodies adjust to both that and the food. It also helps, she’s found, to give her mind something to do—to fill in empty time she would otherwise have spent meditating or studying with something less productive and more prone to observing.

She waits patiently, sitting on edge of the biobed while her body acclimatizes to a new dosage and her feet dangle over it. The doctor attempts to return the hypo to the replicator for recycling, before he stops, scowling. Then he tries again, cursing under his breath.

“It’s voice activated,” she offers, after a time she sufficiently deems his pride would not be wounded.

“Sorry—not familiar with this new model,” he says, after that’s done. He’s not one of the human specialists; he wears a Starfleet science officer uniform, but it isn’t relevant to her purpose here to ask, so she doesn’t, and he doesn’t take her new silence against her. “Christ, it’s been a long day.”

T’Cyph waits another five minutes just to be sure that there is no allergic reaction. In the meantime, the doctor takes the PADD and scrolls through it, checking her medical records.

“You sure you should be walking around on your own?” he asks, after a stream of questions about the emergency appointment recorded about her allergic reaction to a plant’s air-borne spores. “You’re young.”

“I am well-acquainted with my own health requirements, Doctor McCoy,” T’Cyph replies politely. “I have also passed several Vulcan rites of passage privy towards adulthood, if that will reassure you.”

He stifles a snort of amusement, something she does not expect. It’s aesthetically pleasing, so she stares. Doctor McCoy scrolls further in the list, small smile turning into a frown. “You have a tendency of skirting annual check-ups.”

“I go only when I deem it necessary, doctor,” she says, in an attempt to recreate the smile.

It backfires, for some reason that confuses her. He stares at her, and for a moment, looks shocked, then haunted. Sadness is rolling off of him in waves.

The heart at her side hurts for a brief approximation of a second in reaction. “I apologize,” she says hurriedly. “I did not intend offense.”

It shakes him out of it. “No, it’s fine.” He breathes, and looks older for it. “Lost a friend earlier today. Small things are just building up.” The doctor glances up, tapping the PADD to save his comments. “You’re free to go. Don’t forget to book your next appointment and actually show up, now, alright? And—I’ve been saying this to everyone—but if you see an idiot in command gold somewhere doing nothing, tell him to report to me.”

T’Cyph pushes herself unsteadily off the bed and does not leave. Hushed thought and regret pours through her. “Doctor.”

“Yes?”

 _“S’ti th’laktra_.” At his blank expression, she elaborates. “I grieve with thee.”

Doctor McCoy’s face softens. “Thank you, T’Cyph,” he says. “This helps.”

\--

It’s difficult to avoid thinking in terms of Them and Us. These days, more than ever, T’Cyph becomes aware of the rift. It’s easy; those who have decided to be selfish and those who have decided to settle on the Amniiba—the category marks a thorough distinction. She has no qualms personally with Eveck—classmate, arrogant yet intelligent; Commander Spock—stranger, aspirations beyond; or Sris—friend, brother that is not linked by blood, whose absence is noted daily. It merely is an evaluation with only logistic comfort.

A year is not proficient time to build a temple on a planet that is theirs in name only, but T’Cyph isn’t sure whether or not it is justifiable to appropriate one from another culture. Neither is it acceptable, she understands, to hold final rites anywhere except a sacred place, out of respect to both his family and his friends. Maybe Elder Selek wouldn’t have cared. From what she remembers, he didn’t seem like he did; he remained home to meditate outside of helping the colonization efforts, and T’Cyph would pass by his lodgings once in a while when she took the alternate route from her classes. T’Lana still talks about him. The other Vulcans still indirectly praise his work. Her mother had exchanged greetings with him, once. Doctor McCoy too, was his friend.

He was known, but she didn’t really know him. It feels inappropriate to remark on his loss and reflect it, she thinks. She isn’t one of his. He isn’t one of hers.

\--

She finds Captain Kirk at a ways from quasi-dockyard, the first built planetside in this system. There was a grand debate over upgrading the blueprints. The evacuation effort on Vulcan had revealed too many problems when it came to numbers. Now, it sits on a ramp port overlooking the colonies, small littered towns that build some resemblance to the old.

“Captain,” T’Cyph greets, uncertainly, to the man with his head bowed in his hands.

He answers without moving. “Is someone looking for me?”

“No,” she says, for some reason, deciding that it would be inappropriate to linger. “I will leave.”

He runs a hand through his hair and lets out a long breath of air. “No,” he says, mouth trying to quirk up at the ends, but he ends up staring out over the colony. “It’s probably not a good idea to be left alone with my thoughts. It hasn’t been an easy day.”

“Doctor McCoy has mirrored the sentiment.” She is somewhat surprised to hear him snort, and sees him peek his head out of his hands, before he turns to her.

“Did Doctor McCoy send you to get my coordinates?” he asks her. There is a strange way he says the doctor’s title, as though he is both unaccustomed to it and finds it amusing, but T’Cyph does not linger on the observation. “Or stab me with an anti-grief hypo?”

Her eyebrows furrow. “A hypo does not stab,” she says. “It’s an injection.” She hesitates. “You grieve?”

“Must be a strange thing for a Vulcan,” he remarks casually, but there is a stiffness to his words that betrays him. “I just—I don’t get it.”

“My mother has said that we must not mourn. That he has led a fulfilling life.”

“A fulfilling life?” The expression on the Captain’s face is at odds with the solemnity in the air. For a moment, T’Cyph wonders if her people’s comfort is not one that can be shared across cultures, before he takes in a breath, and lowers his eyes, and for a few moments is silent. Then, he looks up and offers her a smile. “Yes, he did, didn’t he.”

“If you recognize this fact, why do you choose to continue?”

He falters, somewhat. She thinks he must remember, then, what the definition of an unfulfilled life was, how her people are aware of loss is and how to define it.

The Captain’s expression becomes clouded. “It’s—we’ve all lost someone.” He rubs a hand over his mouth. “It’s painful to lose a friend,” he admits. He looks at the envoy. “It’s painful to know that he’s going to be gone and I couldn’t have done a damn thing to stop it. Logically, just...”

Acknowledging the Elder’s lifespan would not be an appropriate or respectful gesture to a species so emotionally more expressive than hers. His people value emotion as the equivalent of logic rather than the destructor. It is understanding that might have reassured T’Cyph once upon a time, when she had not known better.

“You took security in his presence,” T’Cyph offers, unsure. “Like us.” Like all of them, who had been unable to regain control. When day in and day out T’Cyph had remembered nothing but the psionic screams in her ears, until one day they had been silenced by an old, wavered, _Tushah nash-veh k’du_. A gentle touch to her mind, so sweet, healing, and yet just as pained.

“Yeah,” the Captain says. Then, faintly, “I really did.”

For a moment, she’s caught in the sight of the Captain, remembers being on the Enterprise and seeing him pass through the corridors, remembers his expressions, remembers the liberty with which the Elder shared when they asked. Who before her is quiet. Dull. As though someone has taken a part of himself away and stripped him of his own being.

“Is this how humans grieve?” she asks, at last, voice quieter, frightened, because there is a desire in her to have done the same. The temptation of self-destruction and its chaotic entropy.

“Well,” he says, “we do tend to cry. But out of respect for your traditions, it would be rude.” He hesitates, and then turns to her. “You said not to mourn for him. Why?”

He is not asking the answer to the question. He is asking for her own, why she chose to tell him when it is clear he is too human and to expect him to adhere to their ways is fallacious.

It is a harrowing question, too raw for her to reveal sentiments and ideas she is not sure she believes in.

“I,” she begins, and then she looks away. “I do not know.” She thinks about her conversation with her mother. “He would not wish it,” she murmurs helplessly, and she shakes her head. In an attempt to regain herself, she folds her hands behind her back, taking desperate comfort in the familiar action.

“Why don’t you sit down here with me?” The Captain asks. _He knows_ , she thinks. “We don’t have to talk.”

She is not obligated in any sort, but obediently, she does.

They remain silent for a while, watching as the Vulcans move from their locations to others. There are no more priestesses to prepare the body for the final rites. There are only their people, and T’Cyph must do something to help, but she finds she cannot.

She lowers her face to her tucked knees. “I have never attended the shiva,” she says into them.

The Captain, for his part, does not look at her. “Is that one of your customs?”

“It is linked, I think, back to when we once had gods. Or to the people.” She tries to recall the lessons she took—the ones outside of science and mathematics that one of her instructors had an illogical habit of favouring. “A closer comparison would be to the human religion Judaism. For seven days after a passing, we sit in respect for the dead. We remember.” She lowers her eyes.

“What do you remember?”

“I don’t know.” Her control is adept to keep her face from flushing green, but she ignores this question. “I am told it can be beneficial, to sit with those who have also known the silent.”

“Silent,” the Captain echoes.

“Hand and voice,” she says, voice faint from her. “It comes from one of our funeral dirges.”

“How does it go?”

“Go?” T’Cyph repeats. Suddenly she finds herself irritated, helpless. If the Captain were as good a friend to Elder Selek—Elder Spock—as he was supposed to be, how could he not know? “It does not go. It sings.” She feels irrational, her emotions illogical. “It sings because he cannot.”

The Captain, for his part, does not reflect his disapproval of her rashness on his face. Rather, it is the opposite. “What does it sing?” he asks her, in a gentle tone that she does not deserve.

T’Cyph finds him frightening, if not for the willingness he has to listen, then for the fact that he is a starship Captain and he is listening to a small Vulcan girl speak about things she barely knows. It is his friend who is dead, not of hers. Whatever she feels in loss is incomparable to his own. She thinks about the half-Vulcan who had given so much, from whose mind T’Cyph remembered only constructive feelings.

“It sings,” she murmurs. “It sings of a starless night and peace infinite. It is a farewell.” He is quiet when she takes in a breath, and she is grateful. It is hard—“How do humans mourn?” she asks, finally.

“We think about them,” the Captain says quietly. “We think about what could have been. What was. We remember them, similar to you.” He understands what she asks, however. Or perhaps it is because he is lost himself that he continues. “We regret a lot more, though. Think about all the things that should’ve happened. We get angry sometimes, maybe enough to shout. We think it’s unfair, that it wasn’t time yet.”

“My mother thinks otherwise,” T’Cyph admits too brutally.

“Your name is...”

“T’Cyph.”

“T’Cyph. Listen.” The Captain shifts in his seat so that he is facing all of her now, and his eyes are blue. They are too blue, like space when T’Cyph had seen through the portholes of Enterprise, before it had been covered by the black. “Humans have their way of mourning. Your people have their own. Neither is wrong.”

She is still staring at him, and she does not have the words. Instead, she finds herself asking, “Did he impart upon you his katra, Captain Kirk?”

He does not startle at the question, but he closes his mouth and slowly breathes in and out. For a few moments, he is as silent as he was when she found him.

“Yeah,” he says eventually, looking at her again, his voice is ruined. “I have it.”

“He is with you,” T’Cyph murmurs.

“You could put it like that.”

Her words come out in a tumble. “Are you psi-capable, Captain?”

He blinks, eyebrows furrowing. T’Cyph feels regret—she is moving so fast from topic to topic. Much of their culture has been lost, kept only within those surviving. So much, she thinks suddenly of Elder Spock’s passing—so much lost.

She feels emotional, raw. She feels the regret the Captain spoke of...fear.

The Captain is kind. He looks away. “No.”

“You must be.”

He must. He must. _Must._ She desires it with every portion of logicality she possesses, if only for everything to be fair, the law of entropy to be just. If the universe must be unfair and all wrongs leading to undoing, then let this be one of the rights.

Let something like this be a _right_.

“Captain,” she says, “you must be.”

If he is psi-null, she does not—how can he, when a Vulcan has bequeathed onto him his katra?

“T’Cyph,” the Captain says, and his voice is soft, and she pretends she does not hear the placation in his tone. “I’m sorry.”

“Do you feel him in your mind?” she continues, helplessly. “Is he now a part of you as much as you are yourself? Can you—” She swallows noiselessly, trying to reign herself in. “Are you psi-capable at all?”

It is too much all at once. His silence answers her, and T’Cyph takes a shuddering breath inside of her, in an attempt to reign back in her control. Anger. Too much anger. Unfair. Unjust.

She is angry at him, she realizes. For failing to be otherwise what his entire race is. To expect him to become the few abnormalities of his kind that possess the ability. T’Cyph has no right.

“I will go,” she says, and her voice betrays a steadiness that is not hers. She almost stumbles over her robes—her sense of balance rights her before she can. “Thank you, Captain.”

“T’Cyph.”

T’Cyph has always turned when someone calls her name. She does now, but the sight of Captain Kirk’s face is crushing. Emotionally expressive.

“Captain,” she says smoothly, her face blank, inclining her head. Her hands, however, fold slowly and sharply behind her back.

“I am sorry. I can’t...If I could—” He cuts himself off, and then takes a shaky breath. “I’m sorry. I just know he’s here. I’ve had my doubts, because I don’t feel—I’ve been trying, meditation too.” He stands up, because he is a good person. Captain Kirk is a good person. He offers a hand out to her instinctively, likely forgetting what that means to her race. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

 _He is a good man_ , T’Cyph thinks, and looks up at him.

“You misinterpret me, Captain,” she says quietly, lowering her eyes. “I am not upset.” Not anymore. Not with right. “I apologize,” she says, too, because her reaction, her impulse had been irrational and had compromised him in a way he needn’t be. Not on this day. “I have made you upset instead.”

“You’re still dealing with death, like I am.”

A furrow builds in between her eyebrows. “Every Vulcan my age has undergone their kahs-wan. I am familiar and have developed strategies to cope with death.”

“That’s not what I—” He hesitates. “It’s just—you’ve lost so much because of Nero.”

Somehow, T’Cyph feels his words are not what he means. Somehow, she thinks he blames himself. It confuses her and angers her. Spock Prime’s death is not the only one after Vulcan’s destruction; there were survivors who did not survive.

“My people understand grief and loss,” she says carefully. “Perhaps too much of it.” T’Cyph casts her glance up at him. “It’s true that those we have lost who we could not save, we grieve for. But Elder Spock has not been lost.” She thinks she understands now, what her mother has intended. “We need only celebrate his life. This is what I believe is the highest respect one can give for him.”

The Captain opens his mouth to say something, before he closes it. He wrings his hands together, sucks in a breath of air, and lets it out slowly. He doesn’t look at her.

T’Cyph is compelled to say, “ _S’ti th’laktra_.”

“What does that mean?”

T’Cyph inclines her head. “I grieve with thee.”

“No, that’s different. I hear everyone saying something else. The...the _Tushah nash-veh_ ones.” His control of the language is slippery, foreign, but his Standard accent is not unpleasant. “What does it mean differently?”

“We say it to the family of the bereaved.” She falters at the look on his face. “My apologies. I did not mean—”

“You think we were family?”

The sharpness of it is not what forces T’Cyph to draw her lips into a line. Rather, it is the expression on his face, difficult to read.

When he does not continue, she realizes the Captain awaits an answer. He is not angry, but he is...he must know. The intensity of it is frightening.

She takes a breath.

“I know what you were to him more than he was to you,” T’Cyph answers at last. Her words are sticky in her throat. “A Keeper is not chosen lightly.”

The Captain doesn’t say anything further.

She inclines her head, studying him. Then, after a moment, she says, “ _Dif-tor heh smusma._ Have you heard of this saying, Captain?”

“No.”

“Live long and prosper.” She raises her hand in the ta’al, the gesture that he mirrors after a moment of hesitation. “To say it to him, you would say, _Dif-tor heh smusma, Spohkh._ ”

He repeats it dutifully, the vowels and sounds a slow murmur. He closes his eyes.

T’Cyph waits.

“You mentioned a Vulcan funeral dirge,” he says at last. He does not continue.

T’Cyph inclines her head one last time. “I will teach you the words to the dirge. You will need it for the shiva, if you are going.”

\--

The dirge is simple. Night starless, blackness infinite, voice and hand silent. Night fireless, peace infinite, voice and hand painless. When they march to the temple, the words ring in the air.

_Mu-yor yel-fam. Nesh-kur’es vaik. Spes heh el’ru ralash-fam._

_Mu-yor yon-fam. Sochya vaik. Spes heh el’ru kusut-fam._

_Dif-tor heh smusma, Spohkh._

 

 

end.

**Author's Note:**

> To [Syph](http://boootycreed.tumblr.com) who helped me through the journey and struggle of writing this.  
> To [fuckthespacepatriarchy](http://fuckthespacepatriarchy.tumblr.com/), [who wrote the Vulcan funeral dirge.](http://vulcanlanguage.tumblr.com/post/25035971794/zhit-bal-tnash-gad-phrase-of-the-day-6-13-2012) Thank you so much for letting me use this.
> 
> To Leonard Nimoy. This began and started as all the words I wish I could say to him, to thank him for calling us his honorary grandchildren when I've never known my own grandfather, to tell him how much I'm grateful for his influence. Six tries later, it's not the same, I think, because that wasn't what I needed for myself.  
> To be able to write a tribute to his life would mean a lot of things—but I didn’t know him the way others did, and I wouldn’t be able to do it without feeling like I was overstepping my boundaries. Though I've never met him, he was important to me. And so I hope that this pays my respects as much as I can. You are greatly missed, Leonard Nimoy. LLAP.


End file.
